Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Tangible Embodied Interaction 2015 conference and workshops, led by Bill Verplank and Wendy Ju, took place at Stanford University in mid-January. As would be expected from a multi-disciplinary gathering there was a broad range of perspectives shared, prototypes exhibited, and collaborative creative investigations initiated. Of particular interest was the presentation about the pioneering work of Interval Research that brought the question from MIT Media Lab’s Hiroshi Ishii – who summed up many recent conversations I’ve been having – “If we knew all of this in the 90s then why did it all go into the black hole of the smartphone?”. Indeed, across the 90s and early noughties there was much work undertaken in industry and university research labs, and artists’ and designers’ studios, that really needs to be revisited to inspire and inform today’s researchers and practitioners.Continue reading →

As we are well aware, due to a series of changes in technology, economics and the web, the global higher education landscape is shifting and impacting the ways in which students learn, how they engage with one another and with the University. In this complex world where much formal and informal learning is undertaken online and on the move, and with increasing interest at the University of the Arts London to provide solely online or blended learning provision, Jo Morrison (Digital Projects Director) and Darren Gray (Head of e-Learning) led a workshop to investigate online education. This article provides a quick background to distance education based upon the discussions that took place amongst the workshop participants, which in turn provided a base for the subsequent investigation. Continue reading →